Culture Club

    You’ve heard of Air Guitar? Well, there was lots of “Air Piano” in Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s performance at Alverno College Saturday night. The movement and imagery of Chouinard’s piece, “24 Preludes by Chopin,” never strayed far from the physical act of music making. At various times, dancers suggested the swinging time-keeping of a metronome, the impassioned hand-work of a pianist in mid-cadenza, and even the workings of the instrument itself. In one section, the petite Lucie Vigneault stood center stage, back to the audience, her hands flying about imaginary keyboards, while the rest of the company lay in the wings with only their legs visible. Flexing feet and bending knees suggesting the inner workings of a piano’s hammers and strings.
    But touches like these only begin to suggest the breadth of Chouinard’s vision. “Chopin” is an exploration of the relationship between music and the body. At times, music takes over as in a Sufi dervish (to emphasize the soul of that transformation, Chouinard juxtaposes two ecstatic dancers with a trio who seem like the were yanked - bored expressions and all - out of a Robert Palmer video). And at others, the fluidity of Chopin’s soaring melodic lines found a complement in movement that turned the body into molten grace. In a solo by James Viveiros, each gesture and articulation poured into the next.
    But how to describe the impact of the dance’s centerpiece, which painted a wrenching vision of forced silence. It begins with Vigneault standing center stage, voicing an appeal to the audience (in French). Time and again, she is swept up by a mass of dancers marching through her space. Yet she returns, only be swallowed again by an anonymous crowd. Eventually, her energy sapped, she stands speechless, struggling to conquer her fear and articulate something, speak her soul. But she can’t. Throughout the scene, in amber dimness in the rear corner of the stage, a lone dancer moves in slow dreamy cascades of arms and torso. It’s the spirit and soul of the silenced woman, at first unfettered and easy, then more and more charged and emphatic. The tragedy of a body electric without a song.
    In the second half of the concert raw, animal emotion replaced “Chopin’s” varied approach to its subject. Evoking the primal rituals implied in Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Chouinard isn’t afraid to use a bestial vocabulary. Early in the dance, the moves are pure energy - rolling high steps set to the thump-thump of “Rite’s” primal heartbeat. And in an ingenious move, Chouinard focuses on one spotlit dancer at a time. As the stage crowds, they interact with feral scratches and sniffs, and use simple props - somewhere between a tusk and a palm frond - to evoke horns, plumage and phalluses. It’s a New World that morphs and evolves before your eyes, eventually striding forward to the audience as Stravinsky’s final chords crash.
    This is dance that reaches deep into the soul, rooted in movement that reaches back centuries and plumbs deep into the unconscious. But it is crafted with brilliant imagination and formidable technique, as well, suggesting an almost cult-like discipline rather than a simple gestalt-ish letting it all hang out. It’s riveting, delightful and exhausting, a world unto itself that was a privilege to occupy for a couple of hours.

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